Reggae legend Gregory Isaacs died of cancer in London Monday morning, BBC Caribbean confirms. He succumbed to cancer of the liver at the age of 59. The Jamaican singer's nickname, Cool Ruler, stems from his mellow, tuneful music. Here's one of his most well-loved songs, Night Nurse:

Saturday, October 23, 2010

With appearances by his celeb friends like Selita Ebanks and Nicki Minaj's voice alter egos, it's interesting to say the least. We're not going to try to sum it up in a few words, or label it. Just watch.

(CNN) -- When Gavin Ovsak started multiplying double-digit numbers in his head in kindergarten, his mother, Cathy, was astonished.

"We were like, where did that come from? When did they cover that today?" said his mother, who lives in Hopkins, Minnesota.

Today, Gavin is a 16-year-old award-winning inventor who's finishing up applications for two prestigious science competitions. His entry is the Circuit-Hat Accessibility Device, an electronic hat that allows disabled people to use a computer without a mouse. When he's not working on these kinds of projects, he's performing improv comedy, leading a robotics team and heading his school's foreign exchange club -- and, of course, homework.

What motivates this passion for learning, and achievement? Gavin says that he has a natural drive to challenge himself and help people through technology, but his parents have also opened his world with opportunities to excel.
Gavin is one of five highly talented, self-motivated kids CNN spoke with whose parents have worked hard to encourage the thirst for knowledge, the love of a good challenge and the idea that anything is possible if you put your mind to it.
Exposure to creative pursuits early in life is key to helping children get motivated to do creative things themselves, said Shelley Carson, a psychologist at Harvard University and author of "Your Creative Brain: Seven Steps to Maximize Imagination, Productivity, and Innovation in Your Life."

TIPS FROM PARENTS

As a parent, you have to love learning yourself. You have to read to your children. You have to let them see you reading. Just stay on them. Stay positive. You have to encourage them.
--Fatimah Memfis

Be an advocate -- go to whomever you need to talk to, to sit down and really explain what's going on with your child. Come up with a plan that will help best meet their needs.
--Cathy Ovsak

Make sure the child is getting the stimulation and challenges that they naturally need.
--Grant Ovsak

We make sure we help them make good choices and decisions by offering them choices and decisions that we want, but that are correct, so that we're teaching them what a correct decision looks like, and what the consequences are for the incorrect decision.
--Rik Middleton

It's important to kind of build a community of parents who have a similar mindset as yours, because as they become aware of resources, they are sharing those resources with you.
--Alysia Brown

We didn't allow her [our daughter] to get into complacent, or a mediocrity-is-acceptable mentality. We try to always push her a little harder because we knew they could be stretched a little more.

--Delongelo Brown That's how Jolisa Brown, 11, whom her parents call a "superbrain," got into music. Her father, Delongelo Brown, began bringing Jolisa and her brother into his home music studio as babies. Jolisa developed a passion for singing and wants to be the head of a music company one day, having learned about her father's experiences in a band.

"It was hearing what he did and hearing how much he loved it [that] inspired me and made me want to do the same thing," said Jolisa, of Atlanta, Georgia.

Parents should encourage their children to ask questions like "why" and "what if," rather than stifling those inquiries, Carson said.

"When they explore the environment, if they're rewarded for that, that encourages that behavior and they're more likely to do that in the future," she said.

Jolisa, one of two students to have earned straight A's at her school every quarter, has an inexhaustible love of reading; without prodding, she will read books faster than her parents can afford to buy new ones. But they also join in -- right now, she and her mother are reading "Outcasts United," about a refugee soccer team, together.

"I think that the best part of it all [reading] is, it can put you in another environment and tell you about something that you may not think of on your own. It can give you experiences that you may not be able to obtain yourself," Jolisa said.
Once a child shows a love of learning, it's important to make sure that he or she gets intellectually stimulated in school, parents say.

For Gavin, that meant agreeing with his school to let him skip third grade, and working with teachers to find an appropriate curriculum. Gavin proved he could learn math and science on a level far above his age, and his school let him take those advanced classes. Now, he's enrolled in public high school but takes all of his classes at the University of Minnesota.

It was harder to find a stimulating environment for Mohammed Memfis, of Atlanta; he's 11 and has already attended five different schools. The public charter school that he and Jolisa attend, part of a nationwide network of college preparatory schools called Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP), is in a neighborhood where only 11 percent of adults over age 25 graduated from college. (In Gavin's school's ZIP code, it's 56 percent.)

Mohammed's mother, Fatimah Memfis, who is a college graduate, found out about KIPP STRIVE Academy from a grocery store flier, but it turned out to be the best opportunity so far. The school, with rigorous homework and a 7:30-a.m.-to-5-p.m. schedule, has led Memfis to become a talented debater and soccer player.

Lack of structure at previous schools concerned his mother. Mohammed felt that teachers focused on the students who needed more help than he did. Before, his only conception of "debate" was "two people arguing about a random issue"; now, he's an award-winner.

Gavin and Mohammed are smart kids growing up in very different circumstances, but their parents share a dedication to giving their children the tools they need to thrive and making sure their educational needs are met.

"They always tell me, they're like, 'The best revenge is success,' " Mohammed said of his parents. "People try to stop you from doing things, there are going to be people in life who are going to make a dent in your path, and you just have to keep pushing."
Parents should observe and cheer on their children, but should not be attached to outcomes, said said Robyn McKay, a psychologist and creativity researcher at Arizona State University. Some kids will rebel and drop an activity if they believe their parents have too many expectations about it.

"My advice to parents who have a child who does have that passionate interest is to roll with it, to be curious and interested about the child's interest and to do some research to find teachers and lessons and activities that support your child's talent," she said.

What motivates a child to be creative is a combination of heredity and unique characteristics of the individual, McKay said.

Sometimes, the result is that the children have talents and passions that don't match those of their parents. Parents should be open-minded and encouraging about what genuinely interests the child, rather than try to push in a different direction, she said.

Neither Rik Middleton nor his wife, Denise, is athletic or a martial artist or serious dancer. But their 13-year-old daughter, McKenna, is preparing for the Los Angeles Marathon and has a second-degree black belt in tae kwon do; her twin sister, Taylor, has been dancing since age 3.

The Glendale, California, twins are all-stars in different ways. Taylor won a science award from her school; McKenna finds passion in math and English. And the twins' guiding principle from their parents, which has carried them through numerous activities, is: "If you're going to start something, you have to finish it."
The Middletons and the Browns live on opposite coasts and attend different kinds of public schools, but the phrase "teaching moment" comes up for both families.

For mother Alysia Brown, that means using everyday circumstances to talk about broader issues. Jolisa's brother plays football, and his mother uses that to have conversations about statistics and sports journalism.

The Middleton twins remember how their father would buy them a pack of M&Ms and ask them to separate the candies by colors, which helped them distinguish individual colors.

A bigger teaching opportunity came at age 4½, when the Middleton family moved into a new house and the girls wanted to build a restaurant in back. That sounded like a large undertaking for children, but their parents didn't dismiss the idea outright. Instead, they used it as a way to teach their children about running a business.

McKenna, Taylor and their older sister staged the first "Sisters Café" eight years ago. It was a one-night cabaret, where they could showcase their performance talents and serve food. It became a yearly, and then biannual, event until August, when the sisters decided they wanted this to be the final performance. Sixty people turned up.

"I've learned that when the girls say that they want to do something like build a restaurant in my backyard, I just kind of stand back, support them and watch, because it's amazing what they can accomplish," Rik Middleton said.

The release of nearly 400,000 classified Iraq war documents by whistleblowing website Wikileaks could endanger UK service personnel, the Ministry of Defence has said.

The leaked material suggests US commanders ignored evidence of torture by the Iraqi authorities.

The documents also suggest "hundreds" of civilians were killed at US military checkpoints after the invasion in 2003.

The MoD condemned "any un-authorised release of classified material".

In a statement, it said such releases "can put the lives of UK service personnel and those of our allies at risk and make the job of armed forces in all theatres of operation more difficult and more dangerous".

The files released by Wikileaks show the US kept records of civilian deaths, despite previously denying it.

The death toll was put at 109,000, of whom 66,081 were civilians.

The US government has criticised the leak, which is the largest in American military history.

At a news conference in London, Wikileaks founder Julian Assange said that those snapshots of everyday events offered a glimpse at the "human scale" of the conflict.

The deaths of one or two individuals made up the "overwhelming number" of people killed in Iraq, Mr Assange said.

The new documents and new deaths contained within them showed the range and frequency of the "small, relentless tragedies of this war" added John Sloboda of Iraq Body Count, which worked with Wikileaks.

Phil Shiner, a lawyer who said he was acting on the behalf of the families of many Iraqi civilians who were killed or tortured by UK forces, said it would be "wrong" to assume the leaking of US documents had "nothing to do with the UK".

The lawyer, who said he was dealing with 142 outstanding cases of alleged mistreatment, argued that some Iraqis were "killed by indiscriminate attacks on civilians or the unjustified use of lethal force", adding that "others have been killed in custody by UK forces and no-one knows how many Iraqis lost their lives while held in British detention facilities".

Arguing that there is a growing body of evidence about the killing, ill treatment and torture of Iraqis whilst in UK custody, the lawyer said there appeared to be "many cases" in which Iraqis died in UK custody and were then certified as dying from natural causes.
"None of these deaths have been investigated, many of these Iraqis were hooded and abused and my law firm does not accept the Ministry of Defence's explanation that each and every one of these deaths has a innocent explanation," he said.

Mr Shiner also accused the MoD of covering up details of maltreatment and called for "a judicial inquiry to fully investigate UK responsibility for civilian deaths in Iraq".

Lives at risk?

The MoD said: "There is no place for mistreatment of detainees and we investigate any allegation made against our troops.

"The protection of civilians is always at the core of what UK forces do in any operational theatre and any civilian casualty is, of course, a matter of deep regret and we take any incidents extremely seriously."

And it said the Iraq Historic Allegations Team (IHAT) had been set up to establish the truth or otherwise of any allegations.

Speaking to reporters in Washington on Friday, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said she condemned Wikileaks' disclosure and suggested the leaking of US documents put lives at risk.

However, Wikileaks said it was confident that the documents - which it has amended to remove names and other identifying details - contain "no information that could be harmful to any individual".

Despite Columbia University’s somewhat unceremonious dismissal of DJ Sucio Smash from the helm of his Squeeze Radio program on the university-run WKCR 89.9FM radio station in New York City, the founding fathers of the show, Stretch Armstrong and Bobbito Garcia, along with Lord Sear and a cast of characters from the show’s mutiple incarnations over the years, reunited for a 20th Anniversary Reunion Show on the station’s airwaves in the early Friday hours of October 22.

The time slot has been mirred in controversy since the decision by Columbia’s student-run radio board of directors, turning the Squeeze Radio show over to students. The argument was loosely based on the premise that WKCR shows should be student-run. The counter argument is what while Stretch Armstrong, who ran the program until 1998 with Bobbito Garcia was a student, Bobbito was not, and ever since then, the show was left in the hands of non-students. Proponents of the show argued that the historic and ongoing value of the program would be lost if turned over to inexperienced broadcasters.

Despite an internet petition circling and urging of several advocates to stage an email campaign against Columbia, the fate of the show seems sealed, making the 20th Anniversary/Reunion Show even more bittersweet.

To download the entire program, which ran an extra hour to it’s 6 a.m. conclusion, click here!!! DOWNLOAD HERE
SHOUTS OUT TO BIRTHPLACEMAG.COM FOR THE STORY!!!

Wednesday, October 20, 2010

Graco Stroller Recall 2010 – Newell Rubbermaid’s Graco has announced today that they will be voluntarily recalling over 2 million Graco Quattro Tour and MetroLite strollers after the company discovered that 4 babies were killed between between 2003 and 2005.

According to the Consumer Product Safety Commission, the well known baby product manufacturer is pulling the devices of the shelves because it was revealed that infants can accidentally get strapped inside the strollers and be strangled to death.The baby product company further explained that when kids are not seated and strapped properly into the strollers, they are able to slide through the opening located between the stroller tray and bottom of the seat, where they can get trapped, suffer mild to life threading injuries or be strangled.

The contraption that are being recalled are the Graco Quattro Tour and MetroLite strollers and travel systems with the following codes 8755, 8324, 4600, 8740, 8994, 8676 and 8910.

The hazardous products were available for purchase in 50 states between November 2000 and December 2007.

The press release also revealed that all of the strollers were made before 2007 and were distributed by Graco Children’s Products Inc. of Atlanta.

Parents can visit Graco’s official website at the following address http://www.gracobaby.com for additional information on the matter.

Tuesday, October 19, 2010

Lenni Brenner......was born into an Orthodox Jewish family. He became an atheist at 10, and a left political activist at 15, in 1952. His involvement with the Black civil rights movement began on his first day in the organized left, when he met James Farmer of the Congress of Racial Equality, later the organizer of the "freedom rides" of the early 60s. He was active in the mid 50s with Bayard Rustin, later the organizer of Martin Luther King's 1963 "I had a dream" March on Washington.

He was arrested 3 times during civil rights sit-ins in the San Francisco Bay Area. He spent 39 months in prison when a court revoked his probation for marijuana possession, because of his activities during the Berkeley Free Speech Movement at the University of California in 1964.

Immediately on imprisonment, he spent 4 days in intense discussion with Huey Newton, later founder of the Black Panther Party, who he encountered in the court holding tank. Subsequently, upon release, he worked with Kathy Cleaver. More recently, in the 90s, he and Panther cofounder Bobby Seale defended their activities during the 60s on Morton Downey's TV show.

He was an antiwar activist from the 1st days of the Vietnam war, speaking frequently at rallies in the Bay Area. In 1963 he organized the Committee for Narcotic Reform in Berkeley. In 1968 he co-founded the National Association for Irish Justice, the American affiliate of the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association.

He worked with Kwame Ture (AKA Stokely Carmichael), the legendary "Black Power" leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, in the Committee against Zionism and Racism, from 1985 until Ture's death in 1998.

Wolverine isn’t just breaking records at the box office, it’s also breaking grounds on the marketing and branding front. Marvel and Nike have come up with an ingenious partnership to create these Wolverine and Sabretooth themed Nike sneakers.

Sabretooth’s version also takes inspiration from the comic books character’s past giving the shoe’s lace area extra fur to resemble Sabretooth’s maine.

WASHINGTON — Wells Fargo & Co. does not plan to halt foreclosures despite an employee’s testimony that she signed up to 500 foreclosure documents daily without reading them.

The employee of the San Francisco-based bank said in a deposition taken last March that she signed between 300 and 500 foreclosure documents per day, verifying only her name and title.

Such practices have been called into question by attorneys general in 50 states. They have accused mortgage companies of violating state laws.

Wells has not halted foreclosures and says it has discovered no problems in the legal documents used to process them. The company said earlier in the week that it would review pending foreclosures for potential defects.

“Our records show that Wells Fargo’s foreclosure affidavits are accurate,” said company spokeswoman Vickee Adams. When the company finds employees that don’t follow procedure, it takes “corrective action.” She declined to comment on whether the Fort Mill, S.C.-based employee, Xee Moua, still works for Wells.

The deposition of the Wells Fargo employee, obtained by the Associated Press, was reported earlier by the Financial Times. It’s the second piece of testimony that suggests Wells engaged in similar practices that have led other banks to halt foreclosures.

In another deposition taken in May, a Wells employee named Herman John Kennerty said he verified only the dates on up to 150 foreclosure documents he signed daily and relied on co-workers to ensure that other information in the documents was correct.

Other companies including Ally Financial Inc.’s GMAC Mortgage unit, Bank of America Corp. and JPMorgan Chase & Co. have halted tens of thousands of foreclosures after similar practices became public.

The growing questions about foreclosure documents could cause thousands of homeowners to contest foreclosures that are in the works or completed. But analysts say most homeowners facing foreclosure are still likely to lose their homes.

Shares of major banks fell Thursday as investors worried about the cost of mounting problems that could cost big banks billions. Shares of Wells fell 4.2 percent to close at $24.72, while shares of Bank of America fell 5.2 percent and shares of Citigroup Inc. fell 4.5 percent.

Investors fear that banks will pay dearly for mishandling foreclosure paperwork. JPMorgan said Wednesday that it set aside $1.3 billion in the third quarter to cover legal expenses, including for the foreclosure problem.

In a conference call after its earnings announcement, JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon said the final price tag will depend on how soon banks can return to a normal foreclosure schedule.

The company also said would extend its review of its foreclosure cases to 41 states – doubling the number of its cases under review to 115,000. JPMorgan had previously said it was halting foreclosures in the 23 states where foreclosures must be approved by a judge.

As they walked along the busy, yellow-lit tiers of offices, Anderton said: "You're acquainted with the theory of precrime, of course. I presume we can take that for granted." -- Philip K. Dick, The Minority Report

What do Google, the CIA and a host of so-called "predictive behavior" start-ups have in common?

They're interested in you, or more specifically, whether your online interests--from Facebook to Twitter posts, and from Flickr photos to YouTube and blog entries--can be exploited by powerful computer algorithms and subsequently transformed into "actionable intelligence."

And whether the knowledge gleaned from an IP address is geared towards selling useless junk or entering a name into a law enforcement database matters not a whit. It's all "just data" and "buzz" goes the mantra, along what little is left of our privacy and our rights.

Increasingly, secret state agencies ranging from the CIA to the National Security Agency are pouring millions of dollars into data-mining firms which claim they have a handle on who you are or what you might do in the future.

And to top it off, the latest trend in weeding-out dissenters and nonconformists from the social landscape will soon be invading a workplace near you; in fact, it already has.

Welcome to the sinister world of "Precrime" where capitalist grifters, drug- and torture-tainted spy shops are all laboring mightily to stamp out every last vestige of free thought here in the heimat.

The CIA Enters the Frame

In July, security journalist Noah Shachtman revealed in Wired that "the investment arms of the CIA and Google are both backing a company that monitors the web in real time--and says it uses that information to predict the future."

Shachtman reported that the CIA's semi-private investment company, In-Q-Tel, and Google Ventures, the search giant's business division had partnered-up with a dodgy outfit called Recorded Future pouring, according to some estimates, $20 million dollars into the fledgling firm.

A blurb on In-Q-Tel's web site informs us that "Recorded Future extracts time and event information from the web. The company offers users new ways to analyze the past, present, and the predicted future."

Who those ubiquitous though nameless "users" are or what they might do with that information once they "extract" it from the web is left unsaid. However, judging from the interest that a CIA-connected entity has expressed in funding the company, privacy will not figure prominently in the "new ways" such tools will be used.

Wired reported that the company, founded by former Swedish Army Ranger Christopher Ahlberg, "scours tens of thousands of websites, blogs and Twitter accounts to find the relationships between people, organizations, actions and incidents--both present and still-to-come."

"The cool thing is" Ahlberg said, "you can actually predict the curve, in many cases."

And as for the search giant's interest in "predicting the future" for the secret state, it wouldn't be the first time that Google Ventures sold equipment and expertise to America's shadow warriors.

While the firm may pride itself on the corporate slogan, "don't be evil," data is a valuable commodity. And where's there value, there's money to be made. Whether it comes in the form of "increasing share value" through the sale of private information to marketeers or state intelligence agencies eager to increase "situational awareness" of the "battlespace" is a matter of complete indifference to corporate bean counters.

After all, as Google CEO Eric Schmidt told CNBC last year, "if you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place."

But that standard, "only bad people have something to hide," is infinitely mutable and can be stretched--or manipulated as has so often been the case in the United States--to encompass everything from "Papist" conspiracies, "illegal" migrants, homosexuality, communism, drug use, or America's latest bête noire: the "Muslim threat."

Schmidt went on to say that "the reality is that search engines, including Google, do retain this information for some time. And we're all subject, in the U.S., to the Patriot Act, and it is possible that that information could be made available to the authorities."

In February, The Washington Post reported that "the world's largest Internet search company and the world's most powerful electronic surveillance organization are teaming up in the name of cybersecurity."

"The alliance" between Google and NSA "is being designed to allow the two organizations to share critical information without violating Google's policies or laws that protect the privacy of Americans' online communications," the Post alleged.

An anonymous source told the Post that "the deal does not mean the NSA will be viewing users' searches or e-mail accounts or that Google will be sharing proprietary data."

Really?

Last spring it was revealed that Google's Street View cars had been secretly vacuuming up terabytes of private wi-fi data for more than three years across Europe and the United States.

The Sunday Times reported that the firm had "been scooping up snippets of people's online activities broadcast over unprotected home and business wi-fi networks."

In July, The Washington Post's "Top Secret America" investigation disclosed that Google supplies mapping and search products to the U.S. secret state and that their employees, outsourced intelligence contractors for the Defense Department, may have filched their customers' wi-fi data as part of an NSA surveillance project.

And what about email and web searches? Last year, The New York Times revealed that NSA intercepts of "private telephone calls and e-mail messages of Americans are broader than previously acknowledged." In fact, a former NSA analyst described how he was trained-up fierce in 2005 "for a program in which the agency routinely examined large volumes of Americans' e-mail messages without court warrants."

That program, code-named PINWALE, and the NSA's meta-data-mining spy op STELLAR WIND, continue under Obama. Indeed, The Atlantic told us at the time that PINWALE "is actually an unclassified proprietary term used to refer to advanced data-mining software that the government uses."

But the seamless relationships amongst communications' giants such as Google and the secret state doesn't stop there.

Even before Google sought an assist from the National Security Agency to secure its networks after an alleged breech by China last year, in 2004 the firm had acquired Keyhole, Inc., an In-Q-Tel funded start-up that developed 3-D-spy-in-the-sky images; Keyhole became the backbone for what later evolved into Google Earth.

At the time of their initial investment, In-Q-Tel said that Keyhole's "strategic relationship ... means that the Intelligence Community can now benefit from the massive scalability and high performance of the Keyhole enterprise solution."

In-Q-Tel's then-CEO, Gilman Louie, said that spy shop venture capitalists invested in the firm "because it offers government and commercial users a new capability to radically enhance critical decision making. Through its ability to stream very large geospatial datasets over the Internet and private networks, Keyhole has created an entirely new way to interact with earth imagery and feature data."

Or, as seen on a daily basis in the AfPak "theatre" deliver exciting new ways to kill people. Now that's innovation!

That was then, now the search giant and the CIA's investment arm are banking on products that will take privacy intrusions to a whole new level.

A promotional offering by the up-and-comers in the predictive behavior marketplace, Recorded Future--A White Paper on Temporal Analytics asserts that "unlike traditional search engines which focus on text retrieval and leaves the analysis to the user, we strive to provide tools which assist in identifying and understanding historical developments, and which can also help formulate hypotheses about and give clues to likely future events. We have decided on the term 'temporal analytics' to describe the time oriented analysis tasks supported by our systems."

Big in the hyperbole department, Recorded Future claims to have developed an "analytics engine, which goes beyond search, explicit link analysis and adds implicit link analysis, by looking at the 'invisible links' between documents that talk about the same, or related, entities and events. We do this by separating the documents and their content from what they talk about."

According to the would-be Big Brother enablers, "Recorded Future also analyzes the 'time and space dimension' of documents--references to when and where an event has taken place, or even when and where it will take place--since many documents actually refer to events expected to take place in the future."

Adding to the unadulterated creep factor, the technocratic grifters aver they're "adding more components, e.g. sentiment analyses, which determine what attitude an author has towards his/her topic, and how strong that attitude is--the affective state of the author."

Strongly oppose America's imperial project to steal other people's resources in Afghanistan and Iraq, or, crime of crimes, have the temerity to write or organize against it? Step right this way, Recorded Future has their eye on you and will sell that information to the highest bidder!

After all, as Mike Van Winkle, a California Anti-Terrorism Information Center shill infamously told the Oakland Tribune back in 2003 after Oakland cops wounded scores of peacenik longshoremen at an antiwar rally at the port: "You can make an easy kind of a link that, if you have a protest group protesting a war where the cause that's being fought against is international terrorism, you might have terrorism at that (protest). You can almost argue that a protest against that is a terrorist act."

And with Recorded Future's "sentiment analyses" such "links" will be even easier to fabricate.

Never mind that the prestigious National Academy of Science's National Research Council issued a scathing 2008 report, Protecting Individual Privacy in the Struggle Against Terrorists: A Framework for Assessment, that debunked the utility of data-ming and link analysis as effective counterterrorism tools.

"Far more problematic," the NRC informs us, "are automated data-mining techniques that search databases for unusual patterns of activity not already known to be associated with terrorists." Since "so little is known about what patterns indicate terrorist activity" the report avers, dodgy techniques such as link analysis "are likely to generate huge numbers of false leads."

As for Recorded Future's over-hyped "sentiment analyses," the NRC debunked, one might even say preemptively, the dodgy claims of our would-be precrime mavens. "The committee also examined behavioral surveillance techniques, which try to identify terrorists by observing behavior or measuring physiological states."

Their conclusion? "There is no scientific consensus on whether these techniques are ready for use at all in counterterrorism." Damningly, the NRC asserted that such techniques "have enormous potential for privacy violations because they will inevitably force targeted individuals to explain and justify their mental and emotional states."

Not that such inconvenient facts matter to Recorded Future or their paymasters in the so-called intelligence community who after all, are in the driver's seat when the firm's knowledge products "make predictions about the future."

After all, as Ahlberg and his merry band of privacy invaders inform us: "Our mission is not to help our customers find documents, but to enable them to understand what is happening in the world."

The better to get a leg up on the competition or know who to target.

The "Real You"

Not to be outdone by black world spy agencies, their outsourced corporate partners or the futurist gurus who do their bidding, the high-tech publication Datamation, told us last month that the precrime concept "is coming very soon to the world of Human Resources (HR) and employee management."

Reporter Mike Elgan revealed that a "Santa Barbara, Calif., startup called Social Intelligence data-mines the social networks to help companies decide if they really want to hire you."

Elgan averred that while background checks have historically searched for evidence of criminal behavior on the part of prospective employees, "Social Intelligence is the first company that I'm aware of that systematically trolls social networks for evidence of bad character."

Similar to Recorded Future and dozens of other "predictive behavior" companies such as Attensity and Visible Technologies, Social Intelligence deploys "automation software that slogs through Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, LinkedIn, blogs, and 'thousands of other sources,' the company develops a report on the 'real you'--not the carefully crafted you in your resume."

According to Datamation, "the company also offers a separate Social Intelligence Monitoring service to watch the personal activity of existing employees on an ongoing basis." Such intrusive monitoring transforms the "workplace" into a 24/7 Orwellian panopticon from which there is no hope of escape.

The service is sold as an exemplary means to "enforce company social media policies." However, since "criteria are company-defined, it's not clear whether it's possible to monitor personal activity." Fear not, it is.

Social Intelligence, according to Elgan, "provides reporting that deemphasizes specific actions and emphasizes character. It's less about 'what did the employee do' and more about 'what kind of person is this employee?'"

In other words, it's all about the future; specifically, the grim world order that fear-mongering corporations are rapidly bringing to fruition.

Datamation reports that "following the current trend lines," rooted in the flawed logic of information derived from data-mining and link analysis, "social networking spiders and predictive analytics engines will be working night and day scanning the Internet and using that data to predict what every employee is likely to do in the future. This capability will simply be baked right in to HR software suites."

As with other aspects of daily life in post-constitutional America, executive decisions, ranging from whether or not to hire or fire someone, cast them into a lawless gulag without trial, or even kill them solely on the say-so of our War-Criminal-in-Chief, are the new house rules.

Like our faux progressive president, some HR bureaucrat will act as judge, jury and executioner, making decisions that can--and have--wrecked lives.

Elgan tells us that unlike a criminal proceeding where you stand before the law accused of wrongdoing and get to face your accuser, "you can't legally be thrown in jail for bad character, poor judgment, or expectations of what you might do in the future. You have to actually break the law, and they have to prove it."

"Personnel actions aren't anything like this." You aren't afforded the means to "face your accuser." In fact, based on whether or not you sucked-up to the boss, pissed-off some corporate toady, or moved into the "suspect" category based on an algorithm, you don't have to actually violate comapny rules in order to be fired "and they don't have to prove it."

Datamation tells us, "if the social network scanning, predictive analytics software of the future decides that you are going to do something in future that's inconsistent with the company's interests, you're fired."

And, Elgan avers, now that "the tools are becoming monstrously sophisticated, efficient, powerful, far-reaching and invasive," the precrime "concept is coming to HR."

This is a Rap Treat that comes straight from DJ Green Lantern's Twitter page. He blessed us with a board feed (in other words a good quality recording) of Jay & Nas performing together in London. This was around the time they had just squashed their beef and started working together. I got shivers just listening to this. It's a trip hearing Hov play hype man for Nasir.